Category Archives: BarCamp DC

Times Running Out Before BarCampDC2

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It seems like just the other day that we started planning for BarCampDC2 (like RefreshDC on steroids). When it was actually sometime in the middle of the summer and we never got serious until late August. Time is going by quickly and we only have less than two weeks before the actual event on Saturday October 18, 2008 at CDIA Boston University. I case you missed getting a ticket we are still taking names for the BarCampDC2 waiting list.

We managed to sell out the first set of tickets in about 36 hours, by just using twitter, a few blog posts, and a lot of word of mouth with probably some e-mails sent to friends and co-workers that they should sign up soon.

The even more amazing thing is we have have like 30 local individuals, big companies, and even a few start-ups willing to sponsor the event. They all chipped in a little bit here and some more over there so that you all could come to the event and not have to pay for anything. There are even a few people that are sponsors and will be out of town the day of the event, that’s how much they care about the DC geek community. Here is the list of sponsors we have now, I will update the list as we add more sponsors.

By them making donations you will get to have a continental style breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks during the day, and a free t-shirt to commemorate the event.

Who knows we might have some extra money left for drink or food after. Not making any promises I have nothing to do with the money except making my contribution.

I would like to thank the following people for their great help so far, Justin Thorp, Shaun Farrell, Peter Corbett, Keith Casey, and others that have here and there.

The final great big thanks you has to go to CDIA Boston University and Bill Chenaille and the schools staff for lending us this great space to have the event in.

BarCampDC2 – October 18, 2008 – 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM

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As you may have heard the registration for the for the BarCampDC2 event will open this evening (September 22, 2008) at around 8:00PM.

Here is some of the important information before registering you will need to know.

When

Saturday, October 18th, 2008, 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Where

Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
1055 Thomas Jefferson Street NW
Washington, DC 20007

Please make sure to only register if you know for sure that you can make it, since space is limited to the first 180 – 190 people. Also at time of registration you must choose your t-shirt size. The shirts should be American Apparel as I have been told and we will have women’s and men’s shirt sizes. For us larger guys, like myself we are planning on having sizes up to 3XL.

The ONLY place to register for the BarCampDC2 event is at the EventBrite website. Putting your name on the BarCamp wiki will NOT get you a seat at this event. Currently we have panel suggestions and will be adding more stuff there as time gets closer.

We are planning to have the panels be 45 minutes long and then have 15 minutes between sessions to get to the next room or mix and mingle with other BarCamp participants. Some more information to keep in mind.

  • Registration at 8:00 AM – 8:45 AM (submit panel talks at this time to help move things along)
  • Welcome BarCampers at 8:45 AM – 9:30 AM
  • Panels – 10:00 AM -6:00 PM
  • Lunch – around 12:30 PM
  • Event Ends at 6:00 PM
  • Clean up 6:00 PM -7:00 PM
  • Bar hopping afterwards 7:30 PM

We are looking for a few people to help set up Friday night (Oct 17) from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM (?). Along with others to help out with registration, handing out t-shirts, helping with food, people to monitor rooms that others are not bring in food or drinks into the rooms, lunch, clean up after, etc.

So if you want to help please e-mail me at jfciii [at] jfciii [dot] com or on direct message me on twitter – @jfc3.

If we have not contacted you about sponsoring part of the event (max $250) and you would like to please contact me. For your sponsorship you will get your name on the back to the t-shirt (if payment in t-shirts are sent to printing), plus like two minutes in front of one of the panels about you or your company.

Hope you all will enjoy the event that a bunch of us have been working really hard to pull off.

BarCampDC Coming Soon!!

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A bunch of us have been sitting at Murky Coffee discussing the next BarCampDC.

Right now we are still looking for a venue and sponsors. We are trying to schedule it for either September and October.

I will keep you posted when we have more information and have a firm date.

Hola Neighbor Makes Washington Post

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Last weekend (10/26/ – 10/28) I participated with about 50+ other people to make a web application called Hola Neighbor. We came up with an idea on Friday night and worked on it until midnight Sunday into Monday.

We had a photographer and writer from the Washington Post come down to take pictures and interview people.

The article will came out in the papers Business section on Monday morning. I happened look and see if the electronic version was available yet and it was. Please read the Washington Post article about Startup Weekend and the building of Hola Neighbor.

More to come later about my personal experience.

DC PHP Developers Meeting

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Last evening I went to the DC PHP Developers meeting. I had originally gone to the DC Tech Events website which is run by Ross M Karchner to check what time Thursday night the The DC Technology Network book group was meeting to go over “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell.

I stayed at work late looking over general information about PHP, since I have not yet used the language. It is on my list of languages to learn along with Ruby on Rails.

The DC PHP Developers meeting was about jQuery and was presented by Joseph L. LeBlanc. It was held at the headquarters of Green Peace USA, in Chinatown. Joseph talked about using jQuery to do animations, by using the following effects:

  • fadeIn()
  • fadeOut()
  • hide()
  • show()
  • slideDown()
  • slideUp()
  • toggle()
  • slideToggle()
  • fadeTo()
  • animate()

He showed us a routine to check that the DOM was ready.

$(document).ready(function() {

// start code

});

or something like that. I might have missed something. Joseph has now put his jQuery presentation online and I while link to it when it’s available.

He recommended two different books about jQuery both by Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer:

He also listed a few website as references:

  1. http://docs.jquery.com
  2. http://visualjquery.com
  3. http://15daysofjquery.com
  4. http://ui.jquery.com

Once his talk was over people started asking general questions to him and to the rest of the group. One set of guys was looking for information about hosting and someone said they had used BlueHosting (for like $7.00 per month) and Simple Storage Service (S3) by Amazon for some of his client stuff. After that we talked about a bunch of things.

I even asked if people had been to either Refresh DC or BarCamp DC, the only person that had heard of either was Joesph and he had been to the BarCamp DC and not yet made a Refresh meeting. Since that was the case I made sure to explain what the events were and where to find them. Finally I talked about the new DC Technology Network and Ross’s DC Tech Events website.

Now it’s time to look over “The Tipping Point” tomorrow evenings meeting.